Category: 2013

ROSETTA ALLAN

Photos I have worn   white tucked socks there – a dress homemade Dad? ring of lace wish   The Gothic arch of the church door frames the small group. A returned serviceman from Vietnam, a very pregnant and elated woman wearing a short silk dress, flowers in her cropped red hair. Two girls, one …

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HANNAH SCHENKER

Falling   Love like that plummets into you, like a cartoon anvil crashing onto your head and pushing you into the earth. It devastates, obliterates. She wouldn’t accept anything less, she decided. She wanted that heavy, falling kind of love that is both good and bad, because you turn into a sick person. Sick with …

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Permanent link to this article: https://4thfloorjournal.co.nz/past-issues/4th-floor-2013/contents-2013/hannah-schenker/

ANAHERA GILDEA

The Last Resort   She felt rather than saw the heat outside the car windows as all three of her skinny kids disembarked in excitement. Mo hadn’t told her about the pool, he hadn’t told any of them. It was his big surprise, as if the holiday they’d scrimped for wasn’t enough. He always had …

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Permanent link to this article: https://4thfloorjournal.co.nz/past-issues/4th-floor-2013/contents-2013/anahera-gildea/

MIRIAM SAGAN

Eclipse of the Moon at Hotel St. Marie   you lean from the balcony trying to see the moon   then make love to me as if we had just met   by cold morning, through a window you see the disc   covered by darkness like the slow street mimes   whose motion impresses …

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Permanent link to this article: https://4thfloorjournal.co.nz/past-issues/4th-floor-2013/contents-2013/mariam-sagan/

GILL WARD

1 | 2   Vicki   On my first day back as a senior school teacher in the East End of London, I felt like a new girl all over again. This was a classroom, after all. Everyone had a desk and there was a desk for me in the front and a blackboard. I …

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Permanent link to this article: https://4thfloorjournal.co.nz/past-issues/4th-floor-2013/contents-2013/gill-ward-prose/

CHARLOTTE YATES

1 | 2   I Will   I was playing with love and squalor All Elijahs in the room, fire and stony brim and losing the light in the shadows I was dreaming alone in the hollows All Alice in the glass breathing down the past and shooting the stars in the shallows   You …

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Permanent link to this article: https://4thfloorjournal.co.nz/past-issues/4th-floor-2013/contents-2013/charlotte-yates-i-will/

CHARLOTTE YATES

1 | 2   Dreams Are Like Sand   You threw the curtains open on the morning The northerly had brought the rain in the night Our clothes were lying half undressed fallen on the floor. You looked lovely in the light. You said did you sleep through the storm, my darling? Did you sleep …

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Permanent link to this article: https://4thfloorjournal.co.nz/past-issues/4th-floor-2013/contents-2013/charlotte-yates-dreams-are-like-sand/